Past 2012-2013 Events

Fall 2012

Friday, September 14

Annual Five College Women's Studies Research Center Reception

Join us for the 21st Annual Fall Reception of the Five College Women's Studies Research Center to welcome this year's Research Associates and new Five College faculty and staff. We are delighted to introduce an international group of distinguished scholars, artists, and activists, whose work focuses on this year's first ever annual theme: "New Media in Feminist Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism." Refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you soon.

3-5pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Tuesday, September 18

Madeleine Kunin:The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family

Please join us for a talk by UMass alumna Madeleine Kunin (‘56), who served as governor of Vermont from 1985 to 1991 and ambassador to Switzerland and Lichtenstein under former President Bill Clinton, from 1996 to 1999. Kunin will speak about her latest book, The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family. This event is hosted by the UMass Amherst Center for Public Policy and Administration and co-sponsored by the UMass Amherst Center for Research on Families and the Five College Women's Studies Research Center.

5-7pm in Gordon Hall 302-304 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Thursday, September 20

Yack the Hack: Women's Activist Practices in Digital CultureAnna Everett, Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. "

Race, Racism & Ways of Knowing in the Digital EraJessie Daniels, Professor at CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College and the CUNY-Graduate Center. For more information about the speakers and their talks, click here.

4:30pm at Smith College, Stoddard Auditorium

Friday, October 5

Caitlin Childs, Lynnell Stephani Long and David Rubin will give hour-long talks addressing different issues: intersex and the history and theory of gender; intersex and/as disability - thinking about eugenic logics of the medical model; and a workshop on how LGBT groups and communities can address intersex. The speakers will field questions and share reflections on ways of incorporating intersex into a curriculum, the challenges involved, and how to move past "The Five Sexes." A workshopping session on syllabi and course modules will follow, sponsored by the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. A follow up event will take place for students who attend the symposium. For more on the speakers and their talks, click here. For more information about this event, contact Angela Willey at awilley@wost.umass.edu and check out the facebook page.

Thursday, October 11

Audre Lorde Festival

Screening of "Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992" and discussion with Dagmar Schluze and Ika Hügel-Marshall. Hügel-Marshall was a close friend of Audre Lorde and recipient of the Audre Lorde Literary Award for her book: Invisible Woman. Growing up Black in Germany. Feminist publisher and university professor, Dagmar Schultz, arranged to both publish the German translations of Audre’s works, and to organize an invitation from the Free University of Berlin for Lorde to come and teach as a visiting professor in 1984. The film "Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992" documents Lorde’s influence on the German Black and white communities during a decade of profound political and social change, a decade that brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re-unification of East and West Germany. 2012 marks the 20-year anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing. For more on Audre Lorde, click here. For more information about this event, contact Barton Byg at byg@german.umass.edu.

7:30pm, Herter 231 University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Friday, October 19

Suzon Fuks will introduce Waterwheel, a collaborative online venue she created for streaming, mixing and sharing media & ideas about water. The platform aims to raise awareness, celebration, care & accessibility of water everywhere. Fuks' current research investigates how women and children, especially in developing countries, assume the majority of water-related chores. A series of upcoming on-line and on-site creative workshops, open to individuals, groups and communities, will explore how Waterwheel can pragmatically address these issues.

Maria San Filippo looks at new technologies in digital filming and distribution that have forged a DIY, politicized production culture generative of new and unconventional ways of screening and perceiving sexuality. San Filippo's talk focuses on the recent work by independent women filmmakers to contemplate alternative approaches to sex and relationships, including bisexuality, polyamory, nonmonogamy, and BDSM. Filmmakers to be discussed include Maren Ade (*Everyone Else*),Katie Aselton (*The Freebie*), Lena Dunham (*Tiny Furniture*), Zoe ListerJones (*Breaking Upwards*), Sarah Polley (*Away from Her, Take This Waltz*, Ry Russo-Young (*Nobody Walks*), Lynn Shelton (*Humpday, Your Sister's Sister*), and So Young Kim (*In Between Days*).

12:30-2:30pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Thursday, October 25

Workshop: From the Tower to the Trenches: Faculty Development Workshop on Strategies for Public Engagement

Special guest Kim Gandy, former president of NOW, currently at the Feminist Majority Foundation. Limited enrollment workshop. RSVP by October 15 to fcwsrc@fivecolleges.edu. Event includes a light dinner. For more information on Gandy's events, click here.

4:30pm-7:00pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Friday, October 26-Saturday October 27

Special guest Kim Gandy, former president of NOW, currently at the Feminist Majority Foundation. Hosted by the Smith College Study of Women and Gender Department and co-sponsored by the FCWSRC. For more information on Gandy's events, click here.

Tuesday, November 13

Eubanks is the cofounder of Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP), a grassroots anti-poverty and welfare rights organization, and teaches in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She edited the cyberfeminist ‘zine Brillo and was active in the community technology center movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and Troy, NY. This event is hosted by the Five College Feminist Science and Technology Studies Initiative and co-sponsored by the FCWSRC. For more information, contact Banu Subramaniam atbanu@wost.umass.edu.

5:30pm, Five Colleges, Incorporated, 97 Spring Street, Amherst

Tuesday, November 13

Screening of the triptych "Here it is very nice at the moment," a collaborative film project that explores the use of media to record personal histories and memory. For more information about the film as well as Ute Aurand, click here.

Both screenings will take place in Art Building 220, Mount Holyoke College

A triptych: the first part, "Maria and the World", filmed by Ute Aurand in 1995, is composed from a multitude of brief glimpses into Maria's world, after her move to the countryside to take care of her mother. Maria Lang's own film, "Family Crypt - A Love Letter to my Mother" (1981) is at the center. Maria, the daughter, speaks about herself, her mother, father, and brother. She speaks of what we more often remain silent about - the walls, the barriers, but also the love. 22 years later, Ute Aurand began filming Maria's daily nursing of her mother, now 96 years old. Edited by the two filmmakers, "The Butterfly in Winter" was completed in 2006 and became the final part of the triptych.

Conversation with the filmmaker will follow screenings.

Sponsored by the MHC Film Studies Program, Five College Film Council, and the Five College Women's Studies Research Center.

Thursday, November 15

As part of a year-long series on gender issues and new media at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, this panel of distinguished speakers from the fields of journalism, security, and leadership development will explore the multiple ways in which questions of physical and virtual security play out for women using media for public engagement, social networking, and journalism. Co-sponsored by the Dean of Faculty, the Weissman Center for Leadership and Liberal Arts, Nexus in Journalism, Media, and Public Discourse and the Office of the President at Mount Holyoke College.

Friday, November 16

Beyond "The Five Sexes": A Collaborative Workshop for Teachers

In women's and gender studies classes (and beyond), many of us areteaching intersex or would like to be. This syllabus workshop is achance to meet and discuss pedagogical aims of teaching intersex andhow they are and aren't met by texts and videos we have used or mightuse to teach intersex in different courses. Whether in our Intro andFeminist Theory classes or the topic specific courses many of usteach, what does it mean to think about sex as non-binary, or"quantum" as the case may be? Let's discuss and think together aboutsome of the challenges and opportunities posed by new literatures onthe gendering of the body, for our courses and curriculum. Led byAngie Willey, Five Colleges Assistant Professor of Feminist ScienceStudies.

Friday, November 30

Her Zimbabwe: Exploring the Heterogeneity of the Female Zimbabwean Experience through a New Women's Web-Based Platform

Fungai Machirori focuses on findings from a three-month pilot of Her Zimbabwe, a web-based platform that has encouraged Zimbabwean women to explore, celebrate and articulate the heterogeneity of their lives and identities. The platform has played an important role in fostering lateral communication between Zimbabwean women in Zimbabwe, and those in the diaspora. It will locate Her Zimbabwe within the dominant discourse of gender and linear definitions of development and empowerment prevalent in the country. Are new media-based initiatives in Zimbabwe elitist? If so, how can such elitism be overcome? Do women who are already "developed" and "empowered" (as the target audience of Her Zimbabwe is thought to be) need their own platforms for articulation, or should the focus be on "grassroots" women?

Feminist Cloud Protesting

Sophie Toupin explores the ways in which feminist activists of the occupy phenomenon have helped shape what appear to be new social practices using online and face to face (F2F) interactions, or what Toupin terms "feminist cloud protesting." The project seeks to establish the emergence of a feminist cloud protesting approach through collected data on new media by academics and activists. Toupin's investigation includes on-line and face-to-face (F2F) interviews with feminists who have and/or are taking part in the occupy phenomenon.

12:30pm-2:30pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Spring 2013

Friday, February 22

Perfectly Transparent: Will the Promise of a "Perfect" World Render Us the Vessels for Surveillance?

Salome Kahiu's presentation looks at the fundamental change in human sovereignty that is assumed to be a main characteristic of the perceived Transhuman future. It explores the idea that technology is using us as agents through which a new Transhuman society will be birthed. In dissecting the inevitable technological evolution, Salome will look at the cultural and social ethics surrounding this aspect of futurism. Does the creation of a "perfect" society advocate for eugenics or dysgenics? The talk will discuss ways through which this agency has consequently rendered us transparent and open for surveillance and monitoring.

Fan Video and the Queerness of Media Convergence

Julie Russo's presentation takes the production of pop culture remixes within female fan communities as one example of the stakes of new media's transformations. Today, those of us who are Internet users are also media creators, and Russo argues that we need new conceptions of labor to understand our negotiations with centralized commercial websites that profit from the data we contribute. Focusing on YouTube as a problematic platform for fan videos, her lecture explores the implications of "user-generated content" for the queer modes and messages within participatory culture.

1:00pm-2:30pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Friday, March 8

Readings by former FCWSRC Research Associates Sarah Skinner Kilborne (American Phoenix: The Remarkable Story of William Skinner), Jacqueline Castledine (Cold War Progressives: Women's Interracial Organizing for Peace and Freedom), Carole DeSanti'sThe Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. and a presentation on Nirbhaya's Body: The Politics of Protest in the Aftermath of the Delhi Gang Rape by Krupa Shandilya (Amherst College) as well as others. It will be followed by a presentation of recent publications by Five College faculty in Gender Studies and FCWSRC Alumnae Associates. Co-sponsored by the Odyssey Bookshop.

3:00-5:00pm in the New York Room, Mary Woolley Hall, Mount Holyoke College

Wednesday, March 13

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Advance registration to ensure seating. Events require either the purchase of the featured book or a $5 event ticket. For more information: www.odysseybks.com

Tuesday, April 2nd

Low-Carbon Footprint Panel presented by Ninette Rothmueller

Featuring an international panel that will bring together four speakers from different disciplinary fields.

Speakers include:Designer Pieter Kromwijk from the Netherlands (who designed the first off the grid floating house), Artist Eve Mosher from NYC (who conducted the project HighWaterLine - visualizing climate change), Architect Gabriel Arboleda from the Five Colleges

This panel is part of an Independent Study in affiliation with the Miller Worley Center for the Environment and the Five College Womens' Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke.

The panel will take place at Smith College with support of LSS, CEEDS and the Picker Engineering Program, as well as the Department of Art.

We will serve a low carbon footprint buffet and request that if you can, please walk or bike to the event or take public transport. Thank you.

Wednesday, April 3

Dr. Dorothy Chansky is a Smith alumna, with a Ph.D. from New York University. Dr. Chansky is Head of the History/Theory/Criticism track in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience, as well as articles in TDR, Theatre Journal (for which she served as book review editor), Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Women and Performance, and Theatre History Studies. Dr. Chansky has also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Today’s talk is taken from Dr. Chansky’s current book-in-progress, Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor in American Theatre and Drama, and looks at two African American plays, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s lynching play Blue Blood (1926) and Langston Hughes’s satire Limitations of Life (1938), that present domestic labor in ways quite different from how contemporaneous plays aimed at white audiences (mainstream and noncommercial) and presented homemaking, the latter figuring domestic labor as either haven or trap. When black women were granted stage time in their own homes (i.e., not as maids) in the 1920s and 1930s, their host plays instead highlighted a wholly different set of problems within their everyday lives.

Thursday, April 4 – Saturday, April 6

This symposium marks the twenty-first year of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center by celebrating the work of leading scholars in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, including former and current Research Associates, Five College faculty, students, and community partners. Through a series of keynote presentations by Anne Balsamo, Alex Juhasz, Lisa Nakamura, Susan Squier, and Jackie Stacey, panels on Bodies/Embodiment, Digital Mapping and Archiving, Genealogies of Science in Feminism, Feminist Protest in the Digital Age, and Networking on FemTechNet, this interdisciplinary, transnational symposium will offer opportunities for sharing ideas about current work in progress and new approaches to integrating media in (re)emerging areas that intersect and are shaped by gender studies. Other events include a screening with Sonali Gulati of her film I AM, a Zine workshop on "Transforming Sex Education with Comics", and student presentations based on seminars that examine intersectionality in architectural studies, Africana studies, and environmental studies, among others.

Thursday, April 18

A reading by Laura Lovett (Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Stonewall Center and supported by the Five College Lecture Fund. For more information about the book and authors, click here.

4:30pm at the FCWSRC, 83 College Street, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

Friday, April 19

A Change is Gonna Come: Conversations Around Old and New Media at Khabar Lahariya, a Rural Feminist Media Collective in India

Disha Mullick draws from the experience of a group of rural women journalists from marginalised communities in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. This presentation looks at whether access to information and new media technology has informed the specific, situated voices of these journalists, as well as the ways reporters represent themselves and their worlds using such technology.

The Transnational Contexts LGBT Digital Media Production and Consumptiona

Eve Ng's talk demonstrates that while much recent study of LGBT digital media focused on content, production, and consumption in the West, there has been little research on how digital technologies facilitate the production of LGBT media outside of the global North, or how the circulation of LGBT texts globally is informing the production of queer communities and identities in culturally and geographically specific spaces. In this talk, Ng draws on interview data and site analyses to examine the production and consumption of LGBT digital media in the global South, addressing issues of commercialization, media activism, and LGBT representation. In engaging new media research with postcolonial sexuality studies, she considers questions around media and globalization, the politics of visibility, and sexual citizenship.